[New/Line] Andrei Kozyrev, Yeltsin’s first top diplomat, speaks about Putin’s ’disastrous’ war in Ukraine and why the revisionist history about NATO enlargement is all wrong"I think what prompted Putin and his inner circle," Kozyrev tells me, "is that they see this is really a crucial moment, a tipping point for Europe and the world. Despite certain deviations in, say, Hungary and Turkey, there has been a general movement toward more democracy and openness. This terrifies Putin."
For Kozyrev, it is point-missing to talk about a "new" Cold War, because the old one, at least according to the siloviki (strongmen) in Moscow, never ended. "All of these guys, mostly from the KGB, never agreed that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War to the Russian people together with the democratic world outside. They don’t buy it. They want to stop it. And now they think this is their last decisive battle."
In his capacity as Russia’s top diplomat from 1990 to 1996, under Boris Yeltsin’s administration, Kozyrev watched as NATO began procedures to allow new member-states into its alliance, including former members of the defunct, Soviet-aligned Warsaw Pact. Before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin attempted to relitigate and revise this contentious period of history, going so far as to demand that the U.S.-led collective security architecture for Europe be rolled back to 1997 levels to avoid his pulling the trigger.